ABSTRACT
Neither Hegel nor his direct disciples on the Left or Right ever wanted to call into question the achievements of modernity from which the modern age drew its pride and self-consciousness. Above all the modern age stood under the sign of subjective freedom. This was realized in society as the space secured by civil law for the rational pursuit of one’s own interests; in the state, as the in principle equal rights to participation in the formation of political will; in the private sphere, as ethical autonomy and self-realization; finally, in the public sphere related to this private realm, as the formative process that takes place by means of the appropriation of a culture that has become reflective. Even the forms of the absolute and of the objective spirit, looked at from the perspective of the individual, had assumed a structure in which the subjective spirit could emancipate itself from the naturelike spontaneity of the traditional way of life. In the process, the spheres in which the individual led his life as bourgeois, citoyen, and homme thereby grew ever further apart from one another and became self-sufficient. This separation and selfsufficiency, which, considered from the standpoint of philosophy of history, paved the way for emancipation from age-old dependencies, were experienced at the same time as abstraction, as alienation from the totality of an ethical context of life. Once religion had been the unbreakable seal upon this totality; it is not by chance that this seal has been broken.
